The Trump administration’s sweeping legal effort to obtain Americans’ sensitive data from states’ voter rolls is now almost entirely reliant upon a Jim Crow-era civil rights law passed to protect Black voters from disenfranchisement – a notable shift in how the administration is pressing its demands.

The US Justice Department has launched a criminal probe into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. The central bank said an investigation had been opened into the renovation of its headquarters last summer - and allegations that Mr Powell lied to Congress about how much it cost.

The Office of Legal Counsel also invoked a claim about Venezuela’s “Cartel de los Soles” that department prosecutors have abandoned.

WASHINGTON, Jan 13 (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department ​on Tuesday asked ‌a federal appeals court to ‌dismiss its appeal of a lower court order blocking President Donald Trump's administration ⁠from ‌forcing 20 Democratic-led states to cooperate with ‍immigration enforcement to receive billions of dollars in ​transportation grant funding.

Trump's Department of Justice endured two more headaches this week named Lindsey Halligan and John Sarcone III.

The Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, congressman Jim Jordan of Ohio, told Fox News Channel that Smith would appear before the panel on Jan. 22.

The stakes are too high to look the other way: if the Federal Reserve loses its independence, the economy will suffer.”

Peter Conti-Brown, a University of Pennsylvania professor of financial regulation, told PolitiFact in July that Powell could argue that leveraging the renovation budget is a "pretext" for his firing — a legal term used to describe a false reason an employer gives for firing an employee in order to cover the real reason.